LitterWeek

The 3rd school just booked the #LitterWeek challenge!

#LitterWeek is coming fast! #edchatie #digitalskills #citizenscience

Another school just booked the #LitterWeek challenge for 2026 🥳🚀 Give your students the gift of digital skills training and smartphone education at LitterWeek.org #DigitalSkills #Edtech #CitizenScience #opensource #litter #plasticpollution #openlittermap

Introducing our very-first #LitterWeek video — Digital Skills Training for the 21st century Calling all teachers! We are looking for 3-5 leaders in technology & education to pilot LitterWeek in 2026 #DigitalSkills #edchatie #citizenscience #litter #plasticpollution #tidytowns

Lots of progress is being made! 🧙‍♂️🪄🌍

litterweek.org just got updated - go check it out ! #edchatie #litterweek #digitalskills #climateaction #citizenscience #opensource #litter #plasticpollution

Fantastic conversation with members of @EU_EESC today ahead of Irelands 2026 EU presidency. Here is the briefing document. @EESC_President #EUPresidency #democracy #citizenscience #inclusion

As Ireland's #EUPresidency begins in July 2026, here's a question worth asking: Democracy, digital skills, and civic participation are stated EU priorities. Achieving these requires mechanisms to identify, evaluate, and engage with bottom-up citizen-led innovation, and to facilitate pathways that foster research, innovation, and socio-economic prosperity. Over the past 17 years, I have built #OpenLitterMap into one of the largest, longest-running and most open citizen science platforms; used in 100+ countries; cited in 98 peer-reviewed papers including 3 Nature journals & referenced by The World Bank; OLM also appears to be the only Irish project recognised as a #DigitalPublicGood by the @DPGAlliance who are endorsed by @antonioguterres, the @UN Secretary General to identify open source projects that can help accelerate the attainment of the #SDGs. Inspired by @OpenStreetMap, OpenLitterMap is real-time data collection infrastructure for the geosocial internet. This now extends to @LitterWeek, a structured digital skills programme to fill significant gaps in smartphone training and digital education. Despite international validation and alignment with priorities, in my experience Ireland has no mechanism to recognise, evaluate, or engage with citizen-led academically-informed digital civic infrastructure. The EU is moving forward. The 2026–2027 Horizon Europe Work Programme (adopted 11 December 2025) explicitly states that the latest programme "incorporates topics designed to ease the entry of new actors, particularly SMEs, civil society organisations and small public administrations" - recognising that existing frameworks "concentrate demand in certain sectors and organisations." The programme calls for "a more inclusive approach in which all can participate and from which all can benefit" and includes specific calls for "fostering citizen engagement for more responsible and democratic R&I." The EU's guidance on inclusive innovation (JRC, 2025) warns that excluding civil society from policy sandboxes creates "regulatory blind spots" and outcomes that "favour specific technologies" while "perpetuating inequalities." This isn't a 200th+ funding application. It's a genuine governance question: What is Ireland's plan to recognise, evaluate, and engage with internationally recognised digital public infrastructure? Is this gap recognised ahead of our EU Presidency?

@LitterWeek is at the intersection of climate action, digital skills and inclusive democratic citizenship

First @LitterWeek pilot booked within 24 hours of launch 🫡

LitterWeek.org is now online and accepting pilots for 2026! #litterweek #climateaction #digitalskills

New website in development!